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Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Forum Questions

This evening my post is geared to respond to a couple of questions that have come up on the Rotary Forum. Thank you Bill for sending me the information....

Here we go...

Morse-Teleflex Cables: We have totally gotten away from the Morse Teleflex cable design. There was too much break away force. Even though they seemed like a good fit to our initial needs we have totally changed the design. We will be displaying the solution in Florida.

Shock Absorber Conversion: There are a number of ways to look at landing gear design. Since I don't have the total context, I will answer the question two ways.

First, early on AWI did a lot of study for this sort of arrangement/option. We decided that in our initial offering of frames, we would use an "amount of travel" that would be consistent with Part 23/General Aviation norms. The average aircraft in General Aviation delivers between 4 - 6" of travel. Normal flight training procedures have proven that this amount of travel is sufficient for "Utility Category" landing gear requirements. The current landing gear system on the HoneyBee G2™ has proven to be rugged and reliable and seems to meet the GA norms. As a point of reference, the Pink Single Place High Performance G2 has been intentionally dropped from 3' over the runaway with no damage to the gear or frame. It was our design goal that the gear design would protect the passengers in the worst of situations. Our Main Gear has an "engineered failure sequence". This means that the gear components are going to absorb severe loads and conditions in a sequence that offers the most protection to the passengers. The Main Gear is designed to provide a sturdy landing gear that provides a comfortable, suspended ride but will in the event of a disaster, maintain its structural integrity in its "core structure" to protect the passengers. When the ancillary components of the Main Gear are failing, the central "core" is designed to stay intact to around 15 G's of concentrated gear loads.

Second, if the question was related to long travel suspension, then one must first consider the effects of "negative coning forces" on the blades during a "vertical descent/landing" that ends with a "Highly Decelerated Impact". If "Rotor Blade Life" is reduced by 25% when used on grass fields, what do you suppose the consequence will be when "Highly Decelerated Impacts" are normal operations? If grass field operations alone reduce blade life by 25%, what do you think will happen when blades are subjected to long-term "Highly Decelerated Impact" landings? These are considerations that those of us that design and fly gyroplanes need to think about including the liabilities of such operations.

Conversions: I wrote a post awhile ago on "grand fathering" on how options for our frames work out with upgrade possiblities. Please see that post for more details on this.